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The World Health Organization (WHO) has warned that it is too early for countries to treat COVID as an endemic disease like influenza, because there is still “significant uncertainty” regarding the spread of the Omicron variant.
Hans Kluge, director of Europe at the World Health Organization, told reporters on Tuesday that Omicron is on track to infect more than half of Europeans in the next two months.
It comes after Education Minister Nadim Zahawi suggested the UK could be one of the first countries to “go” from pandemic to endemic.
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0:51 The world faces “continuous rises in the Corona virus”
Omicron is on course to infect more than half of Europeans in two months
Europe saw more than seven million new cases reported in the first week of 2022, more than doubling over a two-week period.
“At this rate, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation expects that more than 50% of the population in the area will have Omicron in the next six to eight weeks,” Kluge said in a news briefing, referring to a research center. at the University of Washington.
Fifty out of 53 countries in Europe and Central Asia have reported cases of the most transmissible type.
Since it was first reported by scientists in South Africa in November, the COVID-19 strain has spread internationally and is now known to be present in at least a third of countries.
Transition from pandemic to endemic
Several studies have shown that the risks of hospitalization from Omicron are lower than those from Delta.
But the World Health Organization has warned that more studies are needed to prove this.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said on Monday that it might be time to track the current COVID crisis in a similar way to the flu due to its reduced potency.
He said: “I think we have the conditions for us to open the door for discussion at the technical level and at the level of health professionals, but also at the European level, in order to start evaluating the development of this disease with its various parameters from what we have so far.”
Over the weekend, Al-Zahawi told Sky News’ Trevor Phillips on Sunday: “My hope is that we’ll be one of the first major economies to show the world how to go from pandemic to endemic, and then deal with that no matter how long we have left, whether that’s five Six, seven, or ten years.”
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There is still a huge amount of uncertainty
Catherine Smallwood, the WHO’s chief emergency officer for Europe, has warned against treating the virus as a pandemic.
“We still have a lot of uncertainty and a virus that is evolving very quickly and poses new challenges,” she said. “We are certainly not at the stage where we can call it endemic.”
Read more from Sky News: Private hospitals to help the NHS deal with the Omicron strain
Kluge said 26 European countries report more than 1% of their population contracting the COVID virus each week, before urgently warning that there is a “closed window of opportunity” for countries to prevent their health systems from collapsing.
“Omicron is moving faster and wider than any (previous) shape we’ve seen,” he added.
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